The NixOS 24.11 distribution has been released, based on the Nix package manager and providing a range of its own developments that simplify the configuration and maintenance of the system. For example, in NixOS, all system configuration is done through a single system configuration file (configuration.nix), enabling quick rollbacks to a previous configuration version, support for switching between different system states, the installation of individual packages by different users, the simultaneous use of multiple versions of a program, and ensuring reproducible builds. Installation images with KDE (3.2 GB) and GNOME (2.5 GB) have been prepared for x86_64 and ARM64 architectures, along with a minimal console version (1.1 GB).
When using Nix, the result of package builds is stored in a separate subdirectory in /nix/store. For example, after building the Firefox package, it may be recorded in /nix/store/1onlv5pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ec5d4-firefox-133.0.0/, where "1onlv5pc3ed6n5nskg8ew4twcfd0d5ae4ec5d4" is the hash of all its dependencies and build instructions. Package installation refers to either its build or the download of an already built version (provided it has been built on Hydra — the build service of the NixOS project), as well as the creation of a directory with symbolic links to all packages in the system or user profile, with the subsequent addition of this directory to the PATH list. A similar approach is used in the GNU Guix package manager, which is based on Nix's developments. The collection of packages is presented in a special Nixpkgs repository.
Key innovations:
- A total of 8141 packages have been added, 3970 packages removed, and 20975 packages updated. 119 new modules have been added, and 30 modules removed. The development and maintenance of packages involved 2669 developers who prepared 49079 changes.
- Custom environment releases for KDE Plasma 6.2 and GNOME 47 have been proposed. The composition includes a compositor server Niri, which uses Wayland.
- 63 new services have been added, including Cyrus IMAP, Collabora Online, Music Assistant, Suricata, Apache Tika, OpenGFW, saunafs, obs-studio, Zapret, Glances, cryptpad, Pingvin Share, and wg-access-server.
- In most graphical sessions, the multimedia server PipeWire is used by default instead of PulseAudio.
- Significant improvements have been made to macOS platform support in the Nixpkgs repository. The build environment has been redesigned to support the native Xcode toolchain, streamline build rules, utilize built-in SDKs from various versions of macOS (from macOS 10.12 to macOS 15), and eliminate unnecessary patches during application builds. The Nixpkgs release 24.11 will be the last to support the macOS 10.x branch, with version 11 of macOS set as the minimum for the next version.
- Updated software versions include LLVM 19, PostgreSQL 16, grafana 11.3, knot dns 3.4, qBittorrent 5, NVIDIA driver 560, FFmpeg 7.1, openssl 3.3, Docker 27, Xen 4.19.
- The Nix package manager has been updated to version 2.24, which enhances code extraction from Git repositories and adds support for documenting comments.
- Support for the Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs (hardware.amdgpu.amdvlk) has been added.
- The Moonlight game streaming client now supports HDR on Linux.
- A new service, services.scx, has been added for using task schedulers based on the sched_ext kernel subsystem.
- Support for mounting filesystems from block devices with data integrity checks based on the dm-verity module has been added.
- A new option, virtualisation.xen, has been added for virtualization using the Xen hypervisor.
Source: opennet.ru
